When we enter life, we are
naturally aligned with our
creative passion. However, it is rare that anyone consciously
accesses their creative passion before they have been enculturated
socially. As an infant, our creative passion causes us to explore
the world to define ourselves and come to some understanding of who
and what we are.

However, very early in life we are
faced with survival needs. We learn to satisfy our early care givers
and align with how they see the world. We do not have the knowledge
or physical strength or ability to live our
creative passion. We must align with the world in which we find
ourselves. This adaptation process is inevitable. It is a
process we all follow. The only question is, "Do we get
through the adaptation process and get to consciously experiencing
our
creative passion and be allowed to act on it in consciousness or
do we mold ourselves to the reality in which we find ourselves
before becoming consciously aware we have a creative passion never
to express it?"

When we are very young, our
creative spirit readily, willingly and freely expresses itself.
However, as
it become thwarted for one reason or another in its
free expression, it withdraws and becomes very reluctant to come
out. Our creative spirit loses its
freedom to both freely express itself externally and to explore
options internally. More often than not,
mind becomes focused on protecting our creative spirit and
keeping it safe. It will develop response patterns to life and what
it perceives as a threat. As a result, we respond to life
protectively and seek to keep our creative spirit safe. In doing so,
we lock our creative spirit in
a cage of our own making.

Shutting down our
creative spirit is about putting it in
a cage of our own making
by how and what we think and believe. Most often we put it in this
cage without realizing we do so. Often we do it thinking we are
protecting it.

In addition to shutting down the
free flow of our
creative spirit as a result of how it expression is thwarted
early in life and the
pain we experience, we also such it down in more subtle way
through the programming we receive. Whether we realize it or not,
what we believe can have very subtle ways of shutting down our
creative sprit and it is ability to be free to explore options
externally and, more importantly, internally.

Our
creative imagination and our ability to explore options in our
creative imagination is probably the greatest gift we have. It is in
our creative imagination that we first birth the thoughts that allow
us to become consciously creative in, and with our life. However
what we believe has a great influence on both the thoughts we
generate and what we allow ourselves to explore in our life.

A
mind that thinks something in possible will look at a problem
much differently than one that thinks something is impossible. The
mind that thinks something is possible will look for options. It
will look and be observant to find that insight that allows to make
the possible probable. To the mind that thinks something is
impossible, it will overlook the most obvious information. It will
literally blind us to what stands before us.

Similarly, when exploring options
in our
creative imagination, in addition to not allowing particular
types and kind of thought to raise, our beliefs do not allow us to
explore what could be possible. It is here we need to
hold
our creativity sacred, otherwise we shutdown our
creative spirit. Holding our creativity sacred allows us to
explore all possibility and does not allow any particular belief to
stand in the way of our exploration. A simple example is dreaming of
a railroad. To believe one can only use roads, one will never see
what is possible if their were rails carry freight and passengers in
inclement weather.

The greatest impact on shutting
down our
creative spirit is two fold. One impact is shutting down what
can be called the loss of "heart
awareness" and loss of our ability to feel . Or, alternatively said,
we rise the threshold on what we feel. This, in turn, causes us to
lose the conscious connection with the
unseen world and conscious awareness of the
deep undercurrents of Creation both of which are only accessible
through feeling. The other impact is the
loss of our ability to creatively play to explore options.
These two are related because our creative spirit and
creative life energy are just different perceptions of the same
life force within our being. It is just experienced in
different ways.

As we grow older remnants persist
unless we go back and deal with the reason why we shut down these
abilities. We experience the remnants of what is not shutdown as our
intuitive guidance. Yet many never really learn to trust, let
alone use, their intuitive guidance which remains and the many forms
that it takes.

To access the
heart
awareness and restore it fullness, we needs to move towards having a
conscious experience of the state of being characterized as
spontaneous and innocent
childlike play
of discovery and exploration of the universe characterized by that
play of a child before
mind steps in. It is in the
freedom of this spontaneous and innocent play that we can see
how restricted and confined our
creative spirit really is. How our mind developed its view of
Creation and of itself determines how we lost this heart awareness
and the ability to be in spontaneous and innocent childlike play.
The conscious and
nonconscious experiences we have that thwart our play and the
response patterns we develop to protect ourselves in the future are
what prevents us from returning to that state of play.

The easiest way to understand how
shutdown our
creative spirit is can be seen in how
open to feeling we are and how much we seek to avoid
pain and how
free we are to explore options in our own
creative imagination. Relative to pain, the issue is not about
inducing pain Rather do we shy away from any and all pain or are we
willing to realize we may face some pain in what attempt to create
and are we willing to accept what arises to get what we desire.

It needs to be remembered, in any
creative endeavor
we face the unknown. We do not know what to expect. Anything we
expect is a projection of our past. The more
pain we have experienced, the more we project the possibility of
pain, and those experiences are holding our
creative spirit captive. It needs to be noted here we are not
just talking about physical pain. We are also talk about the pain of
rejection and the like by others when we do not act in the way they
want us to act. In essence, there is a form of pain we experience
every time the
free flow of our creative spirit is thwarted. Knowing we may
experience pain and putting in place compensatory measures is one
thing. Believing we will experience pain and not acting is another.

This exploration to determine now
shutdown we are starts by exploring how
free we are to exploring options in our
creative imagination and the bring into that exploration moving
deeper and deeper into feeling and what we feel. In this
exploration,
pain in one form or another tends to stand at the doorway of the
exploration. The question becomes, "Are we willing to face the pain
and all the other reasons that cause us to be unable to allow the
free flow and free expression of our
creative spirit." Freeing our creative spirit requires us to
visit and process the pain we experienced when the free expression
of our creative spirit was originally thwarted.

If we donít go back and
re-experience this form of play, we are fooling ourselves as to
whether or not we know what an experience of the
heart
looks like and as to what Creation really is. If we have not
experienced a conscious return to a state of being that can be
described as a spontaneously and innocent
childlike play
of discovery and exploration and/or a feeling of
wonderment and "ah" at the Universe at some time in our life
as an adult, we have not experienced the conscious awareness of the
heart.
Otherwise what we have experienced is only a creation of the
mind no matter how blissful, joyful and fully the experience may
be.

We are all born
mystics fully in touch with that
unseen and seemingly mystical and magical part of
creation and lose it growing up. We only need to regain what is
already ours. When we do, we will find that we are aligning with the
source/Source
of our
creative power.